My (uninformed!) theory is that dreams are just what brains/neurons appear to do when the driving signal (thought) is mostly disconnected, but the filter (inter

My (uninformed!) theory is that dreams are just what brains/neurons appear to do when the driving signal (thought) is mostly disconnected, but the filter (interpretation) is still active. I.e. just neural noise, following pathway patterns by biological necessity, but shaped into conceptual patterns by our overactive pattern matchers which do a ton of work to arrange input into a limited set of "observations". If that's true, nothing we ever dream is truly novel, but just assembled or permuted from the giant set of our own known or imagined pieces. Which seems pretty consistent with my dreams, at least. And it explains the phenomenon be being unable to recognize the dream state without altering it. Heisendreams!